Noora Alsaeed has often thought about building a snowman on Mars.Let’s go over that again. A snowman on Mars? That desertlike, desolate planet over there? The one covered in sand? What an unusual daydream.But Alsaeed knows a few things that the rest of us don’t. She is a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder whose work relies on data from a NASA spacecraft that orbits Mars.
The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest.President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States.
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Google’s parent company, Alphabet, today announced that it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, joining a tech-and-media layoff list that already includes Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Snap, Twitter, and Warner Bros. Discovery.
We look at calls for police accountability in Los Angeles, where officers killed three men of color within 48 hours earlier this month, including 31-year-old Black school teacher Keenan Anderson, who died hours after he was repeatedly tasered. We speak with Anderson’s cousin Patrisse Cullors, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, who has joined in protests over the police killings. “The last two weeks have been a nightmare,” says Cullors.
We get an update on calls for an independent investigation into the Atlanta police killing of an activist during a violent raid Wednesday on a proposed $90 million training facility in a public forest, known by opponents to the facility as “Cop City.
In Washington, D.C., human rights and free speech advocates gather today for the Belmarsh Tribunal, focused on the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for publishing documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Biden administration plans to widen testing of bathroom waste when international flights arrive.
The agencies said the surveillance signal “is very unlikely” to represent a “true clinical risk” and said they continued to recommend the vaccine.
Architect of the administration’s mass vaccination campaign will exit amid preparations for end of the emergency response
The Biden administration is forwarding lists of senior facilities with zero people vaccinated to state regulators for review and possible penalties.
Fed officials are signaling that they’re determined to keep their vise-like grip on the economy through the end of 2023.
People close to Yellen said she had considered leaving for family reasons and because the Treasury job is highly political — and would become more so with Republicans in control of the House.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
We speak with philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who has recently written two widely acclaimed books: “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)” and “Reconsidering Reparations,” which focuses in part on the climate crisis.
Abigail Disney rips Davos as a “farce” until participants start talking about the “only thing that can make a difference: Taxing the rich.
“I don’t think that that’s the job of another member of Congress to say or call for,” said Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) of fellow Rep. George Santos.
“Stop playing games, this leaking cannot be allowed to happen,” Trump railed.
The Colorado Republican confirmed reporting she had told her Georgia colleague: “Don’t be ugly.
“If anybody doubts the climate is changing, they must have been asleep for the last couple of years,” the president said.
A defeated New Mexico GOP candidate allegedly hired others to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials, in a case that is intensifying concerns about political violence in America.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The longest study on human happiness found the key to a good life.
On the day after Christmas, the British novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi was visiting Rome when he suddenly blacked out in his apartment and woke up immobilized. “I then experienced what can only be described [as] a scooped, semi-circular object with talons attached scuttling towards me,” he tweeted 11 days later from his hospital bed. “Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was my hand, an uncanny object over which I had no agency.
Every Thanksgiving weekend, once the holiday itself has passed and people are looking for things to do for the rest of the break, I get texts from friends seeking movie recommendations: What’s worth seeing in theaters right now? In 2022, that query became more of a plea.
In a normal year, the March for Life would begin somewhere along the National Mall. The cavalcade of anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., would wind around museums and past monuments, concluding at the foot of the Supreme Court, a physical representation of the movement’s objective: to overturn Roe v. Wade. The march happens in January of each year to coincide with the anniversary of the Roe decision.But this is not a normal year.
It was a dramatic scene when scientist and climate activist Rose Abramoff joined fellow scientist Peter Kalmus in December to disrupt the world’s biggest meeting of scientists who study Earth and space: the American Geophysical Union. The nonviolent protest was meant as a call to action to address the climate crisis. She and Kalmus went up on stage and unfurled a banner that read, “Out of the lab & into the streets.” This was not Abramoff’s first protest.
We get an update on Azerbaijan’s month-long blockade of the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh, home to ethnic Armenians in the South Caucasus. Russia, which brokered a ceasefire between the two countries in 2020 following six weeks of intense fighting, says it’s ready to send troops to the Armenia-Azerbaijan border, but with the Russian military bogged down in a costly war in Ukraine, the country’s capacity to enforce a settlement may have changed.
As election violence fueled by lies about “rigged” elections escalates, we go to New Mexico to look at how a former far-right Republican candidate and election denier faces charges of orchestrating shootings at the homes of four Democratic officials following his landslide election loss. We speak with Debbie O’Malley, former Bernalillo County commissioner, whose home was attacked, and with New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver.
The Biden administration plans to widen testing of bathroom waste when international flights arrive.
The agencies said the surveillance signal “is very unlikely” to represent a “true clinical risk” and said they continued to recommend the vaccine.
Architect of the administration’s mass vaccination campaign will exit amid preparations for end of the emergency response
The Biden administration is forwarding lists of senior facilities with zero people vaccinated to state regulators for review and possible penalties.